01 October 2008

non-committal junkies, and an occasional well-dressed middleaged detective posing as a bookie and hanging around half for interest and half for duty. It was the typical place for Neal to put down his request. All kinds of evil plans are hatched in Ross Bar---you can sense it in the air---and all kinds of mad sexual routines are initiated to go with it. The safecracker not only proposes a certain loft on Fourteenth Street to the hoodlum but that they sleep together. Kinsey spent a lot of time in Ross Bar interviewing some of the boys; I was there the night his assistant came, in 1945. Hunkey and Allen were interviewed. Neal and I drove back to York Avenue and found Louanne in bed. Hinkle was roaming his ghost around New York. Neal told her what we had decided. She said she was pleased. I wasn’t so sure myself. I had to prove I’d go through with it. The bed was the bed my father had died in---I had given it to Allen a week before, Neal and I had driven it in from the Island. My father had been a big man and the bed sagged in the middle. Louanne lay there, with Neal and I on both sides of her poised on the upjutting mattress-ends, not knowing what to say. I said “Ah hell I can’t do this.” “Go on man, you promised!” said Neal. “What about Louanne?” I said. “Come on Louanne, what do you think?” “Go ahead” she said. She grabbed me and I tried to forget Neal was there. Every time I realized he was lying there, stiff as a board and listening for every sound in the dark I couldn’t make it. I kept rolling off. It was horrible. “We must all relax” said Neal. “I’m afraid I can’t make it. Why don’t you go in the kitchen for a minute?” Neal did so. Still my heart wasn’t in it. Louanne was a lovely woman to have wrapped around you; she was warm and she was ready; and extremely languid. I whispered we would try it again in San Francisco when things were right. It was 3 children of the earth trying to decide something in the night and having all the weight of past centuries ballooning in the dark before them. There was a strange quiet in the apartment. I went and tapped Neal and told him to go to Louanne; and I retired on the couch. I heard them frantically rocking the bed back and forth: to my amazement I realized Neal was, shall we say, devouring her, and this was the usual routine with them. Only a guy